Lotus Notes Umra crash investigation

Here at Tools4ever we are proud on the stability of UMRA. So when a crash occurs it get priority. And if the client is using one of our connectors, I am mostly assigned to figure out the cause...

Last month we had a big customer with some Lotus Notes issue. The client has some help desk forms to restore passwords using the complicated lotus notes procedure with just a few clicks of the mouse and reset the password not only in lotus notes, but also in AD, fully automated. Also they can create a user on Notes and AD in a few clicks, or disable them etc.

We use the lotus notes c++ and C api to communicate with Lotus Notes. However, this API has a lot of problems and "undocumented features" aka bugs. Well of course any product has, but those are still annoying. Especially when they cause crashes of the whole lotus notes client and any programs running the notes api. So this client came to us with an unexpected UMRA service shutdown. This kind of support request always get big attention immediately, because unexpected shutdowns (crashes) are well not tolerated. The program should always close nicely, so if it doesn't we fix it. Happily for us it does not happen a lot. Unfortunately it happens at a large international client, using lotus notes. Because of the extensive logging we soon found out it was caused by the lotus notes api and investigating a little further brought us to the underlying problem. When Lotus Notes items are going to be big (32KB for items with the summary flag and 64KB for items without this flag) the lotus notes api should return an error code. It doesn't it throws an exception in an other thread, not handled by UMRA causing a crash and some kind of shutdown of all lotus applications running at that moment. After confirming this was the problem (the clients notes item where 31KB+ while we added some bytes...) we installed a beta release at the customers site today. Not only preventing the crash, but also anticipating on items getting to big, by creating a new document and redirect the output to the new document.

user management resource administrator and aura lotus novell teletop it's learning etc.

Here at Tools4ever we try to connect to every possible user system. How? With User Management Resource Administrator (or umra for friends). Umra is a system to read users in one system and create them in other system(s), or to provide a little form to a help desk employee requesting a few variables (name, address, whatever the customer wants) and create the user in 1 or more systems, updating your Topdesk help desk database etc.

Not only do we create user accounts in Active Directory (duh), but also Novell and Lotus Notes (well actually lotus domino of course) are supported + like lots and lots of HR, E-Learning and other systems

Schools and Soap

Traditionally schools have big user transitions every year. So a lot of schools are familiar with Tools4ever and UMRA. More and more e-learning systems are supporting SOAP interface to create and read user information. Those interfaces are used by UMRA to communicate with those systems. We use advanced (and then I really mean advanced, with multi-threading, exception handling, on the fly proxy dll generation, secure password handling etc.) PowerShell scripts to send and retrieve those information.

With the latest UMRA release the framework is heavy extended to support all those advanced PowerShell scripts. Also some customers already have some customized installations to support N@TSchool, Teletop and Aura. All working very well with high performance.

We are trying to release most connectors for the mentioned systems before the summer. So keep watching the Tools4ever website at http://www.tools4ever.com or this blog.

Also the connection to It's Learning (E-Learning system) is progressing. It's learning extended their soap interface to support the heavy usage of this interface by UMRA, as soon as this new interface is released UMRA will be extended to support the It's learning functionality

So this year a lot of connections will come to you all with high performance, fault detection, logging etc.

Also we are working on GoogleApps, Live@edu and Outlook Live connectors, more about them in a next post.